Editor's note: At the time this article was
originally published in The Charger in the Fall of 2001, Sid Sidlo was editor of the The
Ramrod, the newsletter of the North Carolina CWRT.

Hitting a distant target with a bullet
only looks easy. It takes a keen eye, steady hands, a great deal of
training and practice, and a good firearm. Even with those
qualifications and today's high-powered rifles, it is difficult to
hit a man-sized target at three hundred yards without resting the
rifle securely. And the black powder of the Civil War era was not
high power. Now imagine firing a rifle at a distant enemy on a
battlefield covered with powder smoke, with shell fragments flying
around, and with the enemy riflemen and artillery in turn finding
you a very desirable target. It took cool nerves under those
conditions to estimate carefully the distance to the target,
determine the high trajectory needed at the time, and allow for any
wind. But that was the task of the Civil War sharpshooter, both
Union and Confederate.

The concept of using expert
marksmen in a role distinct from that of the ordinary infantryman
was proposed in the summer of 1861 by the brilliant but erratic
Hiram G. Berdan of New York, a mechanical engineer, prolific
inventor - he originated a repeating rifle before the war, and a
range finder and a torpedo boat for evading torpedo nets during and
after the conflict - and the amateur champion marksman of the United
States since 1846. He received permission from the government to
recruit two regiments of qualified riflemen that would be armed with
superior rifles.

Only crack shots needed to apply.
The chosen few had to put ten consecutive shots in a 10-inch circle
at 200 yards, although with their choice of weapon and position. Try
it sometime. But Berdan recruited extensively from Wisconsin to
Vermont, and by November of 1861 the 1st and 2nd regiments of U.S.
Sharpshooters had been mustered into service. They served throughout
the war, and it was claimed that Berdan's regiments probably killed
more rebel soldiers than any other regiments in the army.

By mid-1862, Secretary of War Edwin
Stanton came to believe that regiments made up exclusively of
sharpshooters were too unwieldy for tactical use, and the riflemen
would best be organized as companies or squads, or even just as
individuals, in regular regiments, to be deployed as the field
commander chose. This became the practice for both Union and
Confederate armies for the remainder of the war.

At first many of the snipers
provided their own weapons, but this practice often posed problems
of ammunition supply. Berdan requested issuance of Sharps rifles
because of their fast breech-loading and outstanding accuracy at
long range. Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott, fearing that this would lead to
waste of ammunition, overruled Berdan, insisting on standard issue
Springfield rifles. Berdan went to Lincoln, who after watching
Berdan give a dazzling demonstration of speed and accuracy with the
Sharps rifle, ordered it issued to the crack regiments.

The Sharps
breach-loading rifle used by Union sharpshooters

Yet because many of the men were so
comfortable with their personal rifles, they continued to use them
throughout the war, even if they were muzzle-loaders and often
weighted upwards of thirty pounds or more!

The Sharps rifle was invented in
1848 in Hartford, Connecticut, by gun-maker Christian Sharps. It was
a single-shot percussion-cap breech-loader that could be fired
eight to ten times a minute, three times the rate of the Springfield
rifled musket in experienced hands. The Sharps weighed about twelve
pounds, was 47" in length with an open-sighted 30" barrel, and fired
cartridges with a .52 caliber conical ball. The rifle was accurate
up to 600 yards, and with it a typical sharpshooter could put twenty
bullets in a 24-inch pattern at 200 yards. Not the least advantage
of the breech-loader was the ability to reload it under battle
conditions in which muzzle-reloading would be difficult, if not
impossible.

Why couldn't a Civil
War soldier hit anything?

The average Civil War
soldier could not hit the proverbial bull in the behind
with a bass fiddle. Training would have helped, but
training in marksmanship was something woefully lacking in
most commands during the Civil War. Little time or
ammunition was allocated to actual range practice—and many
recruits went into battle without having fired a single
practice round. Little wonder that pounds of lead were
expended for each hit made, that many a man fired his
piece, unaimed, into the blue, or that front-rank men,
their ears ringing or their beards singed, were known to
turn about and pummel their overzealous rear-rank
comrades.

What made hitting
a target extremely difficult was the high trajectory of the huge
chunks of lead thrown by the old rifled muskets. Ranges
had to be correctly estimated and sights carefully
adjusted for anything but the very closest ranges. A
bullet fired by a kneeling man at the belt buckle of a man
running toward him at an estimated range of 300 yards
would just pass over the head of a man 250 yards away.
Thus, if the shooter had overestimated the range by as
little as 50 yards he would have missed.

To load his gun, the rifleman
dropped the breech block by pushing forward on the trigger guard,
then inserted a paper or linen cartridge. Pulling back the trigger
guard raised and closed the breech block, on which a knife edge cut
open the cartridge end to accept ignition from the cap. The
hammer was then cocked manually. The combustible cartridge was
consumed in the explosion, simplifying reloading. The linen
cartridge, also invented by Sharps, held its shape better than paper
and could stand rougher treatment. Metallic cartridges did not come
along until after the war.

The Sharps rifle should not be
confused with the breech-loading Sharps carbine, also .52 caliber,
used by cavalry, where the ability to reload quickly while on
horseback was often the deciding factor. The carbine weighed only
eight pounds and was a handy 39" long. (Just as an aside, the term
"sharpshooter" doesn't come from Sharps' name. It originated in
Austria about the turn of The nineteenth century.)

The Confederate government bought
Sharps rifles from northern manufacturers before Ft. Sumter, and
made their own "Richmond Sharps" during the war (although these were
of inferior quality). But their favorite sniper weapon was the
Whitworth .45 caliber rifle, an English design from the mid-1850s.
Forty-nine inches in overall length, it fired a six-sided grooved
bullet through a 33-inch barrel having a hexagonal bore with a rapid
twist that gave phenomenal steadiness to the bullet's flight.

The Whitworth was the most accurate
long-range rifle of the Civil War. With an open sight and firing
from a fixed rest or the prone position, the shooter could place his
shots in a twelve-inch diameter circle at 500 yards. With the 14 1/2
" telescopic sight mounted on the left of the stock, the rifle had a
killing range of 1500-1800 yards, or about a mile. We all know the
story of Union general John Sedgwick, killed at Spotsylvania when
shot in the head by a bullet fired from a Whitworth rifle 800 yards
distant.

The Whitworth too was fired with a
percussion cap. Its disadvantage was that it was a muzzle-loader,
hence slow to load, and like all muzzle-loaders, needed cleaning
every few rounds. But its outstanding accuracy made it worth the
trouble. It was usually issued only to top marksmen in the Confederate
army corps.

The mission of the sharpshooter was
to kill from a distance. Feared by both sides, he was as much a
psychological as a tactical weapon of the Civil War. While most
valuable in a protracted siege operation, he was useful in combat
large and small. With a superior weapon fired from a rest such as a
tree limb, skilled shots could hit small targets at half a mile or
more. But these riflemen were often rural lads who had grown up with
rifles in their hands, and many were probably good enough to be
nearly as proficient with a Springfield as with a Whitworth rifle.
Accuracy under these conditions was important, but the breech-loader
rate of fire was even more advantageous.

The position of sharpshooter in any
regiment was usually an enviable one. In many units. North and
South, they were often excused from routine camp and guard duty and
spent hours daily in the more satisfying exercises of marksmanship
and estimating distance. Since even in the heat of battle they could
fire individually and more carefully than the ordinary soldier with
a Springfield rifle, they were equipped with hand-held mechanical
range finders that estimated distance, and thus trajectory, based
upon the target's apparent height.

On the other hand, while
sharpshooters did not have to endure the mass fire on the regimental
line, they were a favorite target of enemy artillery and
sharpshooters just as enemy officers and artillery batteries were
their favorite targets. Sharpshooters were often in demand as
skirmishers. Overall, they had a rate of casualties typical of
ordinary soldiers in line of battle.